Sep 18 Hi, TPV, I'm Seanwright

This is just a quick post to reintroduce myself. I have been here at The People's View this week cooling my heels while I participate in the Daily Kos boycott organized by Robinswing last Sunday. I recognize some people here who have been regulars at Daily Kos and realize that most people I recognize here are people who tended to recommend my comments and diaries and vice versa.

About a year ago, Deaniac did me the honor of inviting me to post here at TPV, after I wrote a wreck-listed diary entitled "Obama's A Game." (The title was considered confusing by many; feel free to read it with a hyphen between "A" and "Game" or quotation marks around "A" if it makes it clearer for you.) After that, I cross-posted a couple of little-noticed Daily Kos diaries here and then went for several months without doing any blogging at all. When I resumed writing diaries at Daily Kos I did not cross-post them here (in large part, because I have been too lazy to do the extra couple of steps that it takes to cross-post).

In view of the boycott, I am not going to link to the diary that got me the invite, but the gist of it is that most pundits and many Democrats have very little faith in President Obama's political judgment, when, in fact, he has repeatedly demonstrated that he is a very canny politician (a political genius, I would argue). The diary focused on the 2008 primaries and general election as well as the passage of the Affordable Care Act as evidence for both the President's acumen and the persistent tendency of the media, his opponents and his allies to underestimate him.
I believe this President embodies the following virtues, described in the Serentiy Prayer: the serenity to accept the things he cannot change; the courage to change the things he can; and the wisdom to know the difference. And, as I see it, the main thing that prevents the loudest voices on the professional left from being better allies to President Obama, in furtherance of progressive change, is a serious deficiency in the foregoing virtues - particularly serenity and wisdom.

I am dumbfounded daily by evidence that purported political experts on the left think that this President lacks even a rudimentary understanding of how politics works, notwithstanding his meteoric rise to the highest office in the most powerful nation in the world, against incredibly tough competition, as a black man, in a majority white nation that has some serious race issues, most particularly with regard to black people.

And speaking of race issues, particularly with regard to black people, I joined Robinswing's boycott because I saw the mass banning/disciplining of several of my favorite members of the site, black people all of them, as the sorry culmination of a pattern of unchecked racism at Daily Kos.

One of the main ways which I noticed this racism manifested was in repeated accusations of unfair accusations of racism, or what I like to call the Rush Limbaugh patented reverse race card. It's a little maneuver whereby Rush Limbaugh (and his many immitators) "immunizes" himself from accusations of racism by constantly accusing racial minorities (particularly black people) of racism. Some of Limbaugh's favorite targets for this strategy over the years have been Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan. And his favorite gambit is to accuse them of racial grievance mongering, "hucksterism," playing the race card.

I remember being dismayed to see the same sort of shit coming out at Daily Kos when the primaries were getting really heated up. I thought it was extremely unfortunate back then, but hoped the problem would dissipate once the primaries were over. And it did seem to more or less stop between the time President Obama received the Democratic nomination and his inauguration.

However, it started up again rather quickly after he was sworn in. The first post-inauguration incident of reverse race card gamesmanship at Daily Kos that stands out vividly in my mind, was a rec-listed diary that contained one of those animated shorts that were briefly popular where a couple of vaguely Hello Kitty looking cartoon characters speak to one another with completely affectless computer generated voices. In this cartoon, one character is from OFA and is attempting to persuade another character to make phone calls in support of the healthcare reform bill. The character who the OFA stooge, er, representative, is trying to persuade to phone bank, then launches into a lengthy firedoglake cut & paste about all of the ways in which healthcare reform is deficient. The OFA rep mounts a weak response with some lame, inapposite talking points, which are effortlessly dispatched by our intrepid, firebagging hero. The totally outmatched OFA rep, obviously flabbergasted by the utter awesomeness of our hero, then reaches for the last arrow he/she has left in his/her gutless, unprincipled quiver: "You are a racist," he/she says. The firebagger protagonist silently blinks once, twice, three times in disbelief, utterly dismayed by the Obot's craven act. "What?" he/she finally manages after his/her three-blink pause.

Since that time, on numerous occasions, in diaries having nothing to do with racial issues, I've noticed various people, apropos of nothing, early in a thread, will post a comment to the effect: "Careful what you say there. You don't want to get called a racist! LOLZ!" Usually the comment is made in response to someone posting one of those devastatingly awesome lists of the President's failings, you know, the one that usually begins with "Claimed the unfettered right to assassinate American citizens." I think most of the people making these comments are upset and offended because at some point they, or someone they admire, called the President "ballless" or a "corporate lackey" or a "servant to his corporate paymasters" or just plain "Barry" and someone totally unjustly said that these completely fair and substantive criticisms had racist overtones.

I've been a big fan of Deaniac's and TiMT's writing over at Daily Kos for a couple of years now. Recently I began writing more diaries over at the Daily Kos and from now on, for as long as Deaniac allows me, I will be cross-posting every diary I post at Daily Kos here at The People's View, because I like what is happening here at this blog and am proud to be associated with the house that Deaniac built and the people inside that house.